University of Michigan commission eager to explore path to carbon neutrality

Posted Feb 9, 2019

ANN ARBOR NEWS

University of Michigan President Mark Schlissel announced this week the members of the core team responsible for developing recommendations for how to achieve carbon neutrality at the university. Hunter Dyke | The Ann Arbor News

“Commission members will engage broadly within the UM community and with regional experts and partners,” Schlissel said. “They will seek approaches and solutions on carbon emissions that create scalable and transferable models, not just for the university, but for the society we serve.”

The scope of Schlissel’s charge to the commission spans all three UM campuses and includes examining:

carbon emissions and sequestration;

energy sourcing;

technology development and policy change;

facilities, operations and mobility; and

behavioral change.

With a charge from Schlissel, Co-Chairman Stephen Forrest said the commission’s first responsibility is to develop a strategy before it can begin employing specific actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“I think our first mission is to understand exactly how we define carbon neutrality in the context of our community, primarily the University of Michigan at the three campuses,” said Forrest, the former UM vice president for research, who has extensive background in researching energy generating and conserving technologies.

“That’s the big thing on the plate – to define the problem and then eventually in the not-distant future to start drilling down on specific recommendations, to get to the goals that we set forth,” he said.

The size and scope of what defines UM and its campus community is vast, Forrest said, with UM’s building square footage growing approximately 28 percent from nearly 26.85 million square feet 15 years ago to 37 million square feet.

One of the commission’s first missions is to define the scale of the problem, Forrest said, and determine what the biggest sources of carbon are across the campus community. The goal is to make the most immediate impact, he said, in an economically sensible and socially just fashion while encouraging continued campus growth.

“That’s very important, because if we don’t grow at the University of Michigan, what we’re really saying is that having a carbon sustainable future will retard growth in general of our society, which I think is completely false and a terrible message,” Forrest said.

In 2011, UM President Mary Sue Coleman set a goal of reducing Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent on its campus by 2025. Progress toward that goal has been hard to come by, though, as the university approaches the midway point of its target with just 5.6 percent emission reductions since its 2006 baseline.

UM has instituted some measures that will help it approach that goal, including approving an $80 million expansion of its Central Power Plant in hopes of reducing GHG emissions by 80,000 metric tons per year. That would put it approximately half way to its emissions reduction goal when the project is expected to be completed in 2021.

Skeptics of UM’s progress toward that reduction believe the university is taking its mission of reducing carbon emissions more seriously with the more ambitious goal and announcement of the president’s commission.

“The university has demonstrated over the past year that they now understand the magnitude of the challenge we face and that our current sustainability goals are not enough,” said Adam Simon, a professor in UM's Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, who called out UM for its lack of progress toward its sustainability goals last spring. “They understand that the practices employed since 2011 to reduce emissions have had not been as successful as predicted.”

One key measure UM needs to implement to reach its goal is to decommission its Central Power Plant, a natural gas co-generation facility providing steam heat and electrical power to most central and medical campus buildings, Simon said.

The university explored biofuel as a fuel source for the power plant, but was dropped from consideration early on due to the lack of availability at the required scale and technological limitations, UM Director of the Office of Campus Sustainability Andy Berki said.

While it is not run on green energy technology, Berki said the power plant’s new turbine will increase the university’s capacity to generate more electricity on campus. In turn, it will allow UM to reduce the amount of utility-generated electricity it purchases, which is primarily coal-based and less efficient to produce, resulting in higher emissions.

UM senior Grant Faber has advocated for carbon neutrality efforts on campus for years as the president of the Students for Clean Energy group, leading a research team with the Clean Wolverines and currently serves as a research assistant at the Global CO2 Initiative.

Faber was happy to see the inclusion of a Student Advisory Panel to help guide the commission, noting that having voices his age will help remind the university of the urgency surrounding the issue, he said.

“Climate change is a long-term issue that is going to affect my generation far more than the generation that currently holds the most power in our society, so I believe it is imperative to have representation and input from people my age, to remind everyone about the urgency of the issue if nothing else,” Faber said.